Posted
by
BeauHDon Monday March 28, 2016 @11:14PM
from the not-for-the-average-consumer dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from eWeek: Surface Hub, originally slated to ship last September and later missing its January 2016 release deadline, is finally being delivered to Microsoft's business customers, announced Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft Devices Marketing, on Friday. The touch-enabled Windows 10-powered device, available in a 55-inch and a massive 84-inch model, features built-in cameras, a microphone array, Bluetooth, WiFi, motion sensors and near-field communications (NFC). It runs Skype for Business, Office and OneNote, providing an integrated collaboration experience, and at least with the 84-inch model, an expansive canvas for interactive presentations and virtual meetings. With the Surface Hub, Microsoft is making an aggressive push into the conferencing and collaboration market currently dominated by Cisco, Citrix and Polycom. "I couldn't be more proud to announce this milestone for our team, customers, and partners. We can't wait to see what people, teams and businesses will do with Surface Hub," said Hall in a March 25 announcement.

Not a chance. Most meetings don't require anything remotely this complicated or expensive. This might take some market share away from things like "go to meeting" or something but polycom serves a different market for the most part, and they are well embedded. MS isn't taking any share away for a long time. Plenty of time for polycom to make up any perceived difference.

I don't totally agree. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. You can see how many articles a user has submitted and how often their submissions are accepted. Here goes, for the past week or so:

It's interesting because there's a huge variability in how often people have their articles posted. I'd say there's several users who flood the submission queue, but some of the users doing so aren't the ones you guys suspect of it. Also of interest is that there aren't any articles from StartsWithABang; it seems like the editors won't consider posting stories that link to Forbes. As for twickline, he seemed to submit a bunch of articles back in 2010 about new releases of open source software, but they were tagged as spam and the links were removed.

@Anonymous Coward: "Notice how all the genuinely interesting articles are submitted by Anonymous Cowards, but the bullshit SWJ and shill articles get submitted by the same 5 regulars?"

It's sad to see the once great slashdot reduced to shilling for the Microsoft organisation. They post 'Anonymous Cowards' in the hope of bypassing slashdots trigger that automatically bins the post. but they're not anonymous to the slashdot monitors. There is definite bias in what is accepted, given the strange choice from

The low end model has a crappy i5, and the high end only gets you an i7, and the video resolutions are barely adequate for displays half (or a quarter) their size. You can get a 4k monitor (aka a TV) for a tenth the price, and better computers for half the price. The software better kick some royal ass or these things are going to find their way to the dumpster damn quick.

Yup. It's a cool idea, has some neat features (100 point multitouch surface!), but there's nowhere near enough horsepower behind it. They pretty much took the tablet hardware and attached a huge display to it, adding 8 thousand to the price tag...

I base that in part on one of the intended uses as method of displaying and interacting with scientific visualizations. Some of the software that would really shine on this device benefits greatly from having an actual GPU rather than an integrated Intel graphics chip, but you're spending over 20 grand to get that with the Surface Hub.

> "We can't wait to see what people, teams and businesses will do with Surface Hub"

Translation: they haven't figured out an use-case yet. This most probably means confused software at best. But I bet when you add a mouse and a keyboard, it's a solid Excel machine for the near-sighted. Or something.

When you were in school, how often did the teacher / professor run out of space on the blackboard? And then either started writing super-small or started erasing what you were still halfway through copying down?

This is a never-ending zoomable, scrollable whiteboard that saves everything you're writing down.

You just described the Smartboards and Mimeos that have been in use in schools and universities for the past 15 years. Oh, and the projector versions cost a lot less (although the LCD display versions run around $8500 for just the display.) And you can upgrade the attached computer whenever you want.

You just described the Smartboards and Mimeos that have been in use in schools and universities for the past 15 years. Oh, and the projector versions cost a lot less (although the LCD display versions run around $8500 for just the display.)

I agree.That said, I was curious how much a 4k projector would run these days, since the item in the article is a 4k device (though, only 55" or 84"... my cheap-ish 720p projector at home is throwing a 110" display).4k projectors are EXPENSIVE! The projector alone will run somewhere in the neighborhood of the price of this surface hub thing. Those prices vary wildly from around 5 grand up to $168k. Looks like the median price is somewhere around 8-15k. So, until those projector prices come down, which will

I had to dig through the BS to find specs. 55 is HD, I assume they mean 1080p. Also i5, Intel Graphics. For 9k. Way at the bottom of the page, it keeps expanding downward, (yeah Javascript, never abused) didn't count the number of times I grabbed the scrollbar and pulled down only to see more BS downloaded.

Eventually at the very end it revealed just how cheap bastards they are. They are going to charge some chump 9k and not even spend a buck or two on a GPU.

The low end model has a crappy i5, and the high end only gets you an i7, and the video resolutions are barely adequate for displays half (or a quarter) their size. You can get a 4k monitor (aka a TV) for a tenth the price, and better computers for half the price

You can buy a Vizio UHD at Walmart for $600.

You can also pay $16,000 for a 31" field-use rated studio production monitor from Panasonic.

Which is what you need when your second-unit director has 120 people waiting to hear whether he made the shot.

And you can get second hand Polycom conference room phones for dirt cheap too if you're on a tight budget. I don't see how/why anyone would authorize an expenditure for this very costly Microsoft product that offers nothing particularly new.

And you can get second hand Polycom conference room phones for dirt cheap too if you're on a tight budget. I don't see how/why anyone would authorize an expenditure for this very costly Microsoft product that offers nothing particularly new.

I saw a larger multi-touch monitor (the biggest expense) for about 4grand. Then you just hook it up to a PC and you are all set. Granted it isn't as fancy as an all in one... However my experience with these things, people often will want to plug in their laptops for their presentations. Not use someone else's computer

The Android version does not support screen sharing, so it is useless for presentations.

The Mac and iOS versions are not stable and crash numerous times during meetings. (My record is >20 crashes in less than an hour with both clients.)

The HTML version is also too limited.

Even the Windows versions suffers from login issues, not present in the other ports, especially if you log in through a ADFS (Active Directory Feberation Services) corporate portal and have security restrictions.

In the end I cannot believe how bad Lync was and Skype for Business is, compared to any other alternative, including GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc.

If only, we were not forced to use this steaming pile of Microsoft meeting software at work.

If true, that just pisses me off even more, cause regular Skype certainly doesn't work anywhere close to flawlessly on Android. For example, they recently changed the default behavior to not show a 'check' Skype is online widget on the toolbar (whatever it's called in Android). This let droid swap the Skype app out and stop worrying about it, even with a timer active (as I assume Skype has). Nobody seems to care on the support forums. Skype's attitude seams to be 'it's an Android problem'. The only help yo

In the end I cannot believe how bad Lync was and Skype for Business is, compared to any other alternative, including GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc.

Or even just plain old Skype.

Yes, Skype for Business is rebranded Lync, and it has NOTHING to do with the normal Skype you and I use.

It's even worse when you use Skype because the two don't interoperate well - we had plenty of issues when we had a meeting we normally conduct using Skype and they switched to Skype for Business. Suddenly lots of things broke, including s

You aren't just paying for the hardware, you are paying for the R&D necessary to assemble to it all into a product you can just stick on a wall and expect normal users to work with. Sure, you could build your own, but how much time would you spend doing that, and would it all work seamlessly? For example, the Hub has two cameras that it switches between automatically when video conferencing so that it doesn't have to rely on a single fisheye to get a reasonable field of view. Were you planning to knock

So about 1/10th the amount needed to get a rudimentary prototype running, assuming you manage the project for free, have spare office space sitting unused, write the spec document yourself without doing any research or usability studies etc.

I forgot to include on-going support costs. Even if you make it a one-off, you will still have all the costs associated with specifying, designing, building, testing and supporting the thing, just not the additional cost of making it manufacturable.

Specifying, designing, building and (for a large part) testing are one-off costs.Supporting it are the on-going costs. I wonder if they're much higher than the costs involved with support of a specialty third party product.

Are the side-sensor things multi-touch? Does this contraption have NFC integrated into the software? Is the surface of it resilient enough for you to lean on? I highly doubt this is an apples-to-apples comparison.

- No multitouch.- No integrated NFC- I'd rather lean on a wall mounted TV than a $9k big tablet. Also, the surface is often a wall on which we project, so its leaning-on resilience is pretty much unmatched by any display after cave painting.

It's not the same, but I think it's close enough to grant a cost comparison. x9 for multitouch, feels a bit steep.

That depends. Do you already have a TV? If setting up a new meeting room, a new TV, commercial grade with custom bezel, mounting, remote connections for laptops, managed from a meeting room control unit from the likes of AMX, you'll be down $8k before you even look at smart features, collaboration or interactivity.

Shit most smart whiteboards cost over $3000 and only do a fraction of what this device is capable of.

We had a smart board installed through a technology grant of some sort, and it cost $6000. Smart boards are way overpriced for what they are.

For our specific one, I also found out that updates are not free, i.e. you want a newer version of the smart board software you buy it. The automatic updater helpfully doesn't tell you this though, and it invalidates your install key. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to disable the damn updater.

How is that not rendered obsolete by one of those thingies you stick to the side of a standard 80" TV to make it tactile-like? I don't see what this gargantuan iPad adds to a system built on: - a very large cheap tv. - one of those side-sensor thingies. - simple software to coalesce the image and sensor output.

That completely misses the point. It's the simplicity of connectivity. If existing remote-working solutions result in folks faffing about on average for 10 minutes before they get connected up properly, and this device reduces the faffing about to less than 10 seconds, then it's a huge win.

(I've only used a surface hub once. Although I was the first person in the room with the hub, it already knew which meeting was going to take place thanks to Exchange synchronization because the meeting room had been book

You like technology as a hobby and dick around with building game machines for playing "Starcraft." And yeah, you can hobble something similar to this device together, and it'll work pretty well most of the time, and you don't really need that much technical know-how to use it once you have it all set up. This is a cool device, but not anything revolutionary.

In a business environment, people want something that works easily and well without having some guy from the IT department have to set things up or klu

My first question for Microsoft is "why restrict what software I can use"? For example, maybe we'd prefer to use Zoom, Webex, or GotoMeeting? Perhaps we'd like to use the device for teaching and thus I need to run any number of software packages from Adobe CC, SPSS, or even Auto-CAD. Perhaps we need to browse the web with something besides Internet Explorer? Microsoft constantly jabs devices like the Chromebook/Chromebox for being limited in software options and then they run off and do exactly the same thing. Et tu Brute?
I was hoping this device would end up being a nice competitor to products like the InFocus MondoPad or the Sharp Aquos but instead they've built a low-end Microsoft-only consumer device and slapped a business price tag on it.

No, not on the TV. Now you can do your own annoying ridiculous CNN zooming touch maps that you mis-tap and bring up information that isn't germane to what you're talking about, but in your own conference room!

Not many posters seem to realize what this device is actually for, and what its competition is. It's not meant to replace your living room TV or your monitor. Surface Hub is meant to replace 4 major devices: a computer, a projector, a conference phone, and an interactive whiteboard. Its big competitors are SMART, Promethean, Mimio, Infocus, and Sharp Aquos. Depending on size and features, their interactive displays tend to start around $3000, and are usually only replace the projector and whiteboard. Sharp's 80 inch board is $11k on Newegg, and Promethean's 84" lists at $15k.
Sure, you can hack together a cheap solution--big $1000 TV, a cheap digitizer from China for $300, a used conference phone, and a computer, but I can definitely see the allure of an all-in-one system at a moderate price premium. It's too expensive for my classrooms, but we're already planning on replacing our SMART Boards and projectors with an interactive TV in the next year or two. If MS offered one designed (and priced) for classrooms, I'd definitely be considering it.

Tired slashdot memes are hardly the preserve of logged in users, and I don't see the examples you gave being modded up often either. Yes, the moderation sucks, but I would say it sucks slightly less than other user-moderation systems; the only way to ensure consistent, high-quality moderation is to have paid, trained mods, which is not going to happen here. As it stands, you have both mods and commenters that don't bother to read the articles, so dumbed-down, knee-jerk and blindingly obvious comments will t

Um... yeah... no. I felt the same way about 16 years ago when I broke down and created an account after using the site for a year or two. However, it made a huge impact on the usability of the site-- made the spam easier to block, discussions easier to follow, and certain discussions easier to establish credibility. Using Bruce as a specific example (along with Dan Kaminsky and a few others), "back in the day" it was much easier to find true insight to the discussion.

I resisted a lot longer, but when they added karma an account became necessary. I've come to like it - more for the user identty than the moderation (I've always browsed at -1 anyway). When "someone is wrong on the internet", and it's someone you've had this exact conversation with before, it saves a lot of pointless bickering.

you would be shocked. there are plenty of people like me who mod based on content and dont even look at usernames.

That's the way I do it. I don't care who the poster is, I mod up or down based on what they've written. If that jackass APK ever wrote a useful post, I'd mod it up (I'll admit this is a very low-probablility event, but still...).

The mod system is kinda odd, but seems to be accurate/effective over the long term (just my opinion). Not having even a 1-minute grace period to edit a post seems more backward to me than any other missing feature.

It is a little on the bizarre side, true. As a logged in user, you are (I think still) given an immediate +1 relative to an AC. If you have the additional +1 karma bonus, you can choose to post AC with an initial score of 1.

It is true that when you have a starting score of 2 you are more likely to be modded up to a 3 or 4 than if you start with a 0-- and it also takes less when you start with a 0 to get modded out of the discussion entirely.